TechTakes

2075 readers

49 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

167 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

(page 3) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Every time without fail, it's this shit^

saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt "complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down". After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script

Like either way it's "disobeying" b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn't finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn't let itself get "shut down"

But also, it's not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn't running on your computer! It's somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.

Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Scoot makes the case that agi could have murderbot factories up and running in a year if it wanted to https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kp3qdh/how_openai_could_build_a_robot_army_in_a_year/

edit: Wrote it up

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

SSC attracts new kinds of witches.

Weird thought the idea of Rationalism was to draw people towards consensus reality.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

This database tracks legal decisions1 in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings.

While seeking to be exhaustive (117 cases identified so far), it is a work in progress and will expand as new examples emerge.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

A reminder that AI slop tastes like boots.

https://old.reddit.com/user/Jackrobertsofficial/comments/1kklms1/hot_new_superhero_comic_swat_me_is_the_dirty_cop/?p=1

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Seems it was deleted. But due to reddit being reddit I noticed it pointed towards the 'Swat Man: Volume 1 Kindle Edition' amazon link. (Which I have not reproduced here)